Re: [tlug] outsourcing email service

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Micheal" == Micheal Cooper <mcooper@example.com> writes:

    Micheal> Also, the cell phone companies allow email addresses that
    Micheal> are not allowed in normal email, screwing up
    Micheal> communications.

I wouldn't be surprised.

    >> OSU employee.  In U.S. academia anyway I would be willing to
    >> bet that most universities would be willing to forward mail
    >> indefinitely for former faculty (at least).

    Micheal> I was doing that, but I had to stop forwarding because of
    Micheal> spam. The spam would come to us and be forwarded to Yahoo
    Micheal> or Gmail or X University, etc., and then it would bounce
    Micheal> back with sometimes angry messages about us sending spam.
    Micheal> In the end, we were inundated with bounced mail because
    Micheal> of the spam the departed teachers were being sent.

Yeah, that's not surprising, and it *is* (IMHO) your responsibility to
do something about it.  I can't blame you for simply shutting down the
forwarding service.

    >> This is not possible in academia.  Companies and government
    >> often have that option, but academics, rarely.

    Micheal> I respect your experience, but I asked around at my
    Micheal> school, and just about all the faculty say that they do
    Micheal> all of their research-related email correspondence with a
    Micheal> non-university account, and many of them simply forward
    Micheal> school mail to Gmail or Yahoo, etc.

How sad.

    >> In fact, for corporate internal communications, you probably
    >> want something that looks more like an issue tracker than
    >> email.

    Micheal> No, I really think that is true, in some ways. I had the
    Micheal> idea of institutional bulletin boards for conversation,
    Micheal> which is sort of the same destination.

Bulletin boards suck unless they're closely integrated with email.
Even people from UW, ie Mark Crispin, who invented IMAP, and people at
CMU, who invented AFS and one of the best implementations of IMAP,
were unsatisfied with their setups (this was almost 10 years ago, but
the state of the art hasn't changed much)---the bulletin boards are
too inflexible.  I wouldn't go there unless you have a lot of time and
some high-powered talent to sink into it.

    Micheal> A series of forums on the issues discussed in the email
    Micheal> would be great, but each thread would have to have a
    Micheal> membership list and not allow non-members to read it. The
    Micheal> advantage would be archived and accessible histories of
    Micheal> the discussions and work flow, but managing accessibility
    Micheal> would be a nightmare.

No, it's not even a dream.  It's called Roundup (still a SourceForge
project, IIRC).  You'd have to do some hand-tuning, as shutting people
out of threads they're not supposed to access is not a standard
feature, but there are some suggestions about how to go about doing
it.  Another issue tracker which is more industrial strength is RT,
and Atlassian provides some superb commercial products including a
wiki that integrates well with the issue tracker.

Roundup may not be appropriate for you for quite some time; you'd need
to get your hands dirty with Python plumbing, and there'd be
substantial risk of leakage of sensitive information if you got the
permissions wrong or some admin or faculty member did.  (It's not
clear that this *increases* risk, given the prevalence of Windows
machines and statistics on US universities that suggest 80-90% have
one or more active spyware on them.  But it would dramatically
increase risk to *you* as the obvious person to blame!)


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